Sliding vs Deciding®: This blog is about romantic relationships and marriage, with insights from relationship science about how relationships develop and what makes or breaks them.

Friday, January 23, 2015

What Is the Divorce Rate, Anyway?

by Scott StanleyThis is a lengthy follow-up to all the recent buzz about the divorce rate.

“Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce.” You’ve probably
heard that claim several times—just as you may also have heard from other
sources that it’s inaccurate. As I’ll explain below, the real number is likely lower,
but perhaps not by a lot. One thing is for sure. Arguments over what the divorce rate is and
whether it’s dropping are ongoing and unlikely to end anytime soon.

Just last month, Claire Cain Miller argued in the New York Times that the divorce rate has been
coming down for a long time even while the odds of divorce remain greatly
exaggerated in the minds of many. She highlighted the conclusions of economist Justin
Wolfers, who told her that “If current trends continue, nearly two-thirds of
marriages will never involve a divorce.” In a follow-up piece, Wolfers explained more about the complexity of the issue and defended
his claims.

Some go even further than Cain Miller, arguing that the
likelihood of divorcing has never been anything like 50 percent. For example,
Shaunti Feldhahn, the author (with Tally Whitehead) of a recent book on the subject, argues that it was never true that half of newly
married couples would end up divorced, and that 30 percent is closer to the
mark. While not a social scientist, Feldhahn has studied the history of the divorce rate and believes people are too
pessimistic about the odds of success in marriage. Although I’m not persuaded
that the risk of divorce is that low, I agree with her that many people avoid
marriage for fear of divorce even when their own risks are quite low.

In contrast to those who argue that the divorce rate has
been coming down, or that it was never that high, demographers Sheela Kennedy
and Steven Ruggles argued in an article last year that divorce did not level off or decline in recent decades but
actually continued to rise from 1980 to 2010. In fact, Ruggles commented on
Cain Miller’s and Wolfers’ New York Times
pieces, here
and here,
arguing that conclusions in both are likely incorrect and that most
professional demographers have not accepted the notion that the overall risk of
divorce declined during the period in question.

While these researchers may not agree about what has
happened in past decades, they all seem to suggest that the risk of divorce has
become lower, or is likely to be dropping, among those who are younger and
marrying now. Kennedy and Ruggles examined an “age-standardized refined divorce
rate” and found no support for an overall decline in divorce, but noted that this
is largely due to the fact that divorce rates have continued to climb over the
years among baby boomers in comparison to other cohorts (see also Susan Brown and I-Fen Lin).

Arguments over the risk of divorce are not new, which raises the question as to
why there is so much room for disagreement.

At Any Rate, It’s
Confusing

Kennedy and Ruggles titled their paper “Breaking Up Is Hard to Count: The Rise of Divorce in the United States, 1980–2010,” and
with good reason. They lay out the history of challenges in tracking divorce, detailing
issues about public records, differing data sets, and various cohort issues. Wolfers’
New York Times article and the
comments by Ruggles further illuminate the vast complexity facing researchers
who try to come up with definitive statements about the risk of divorcing.

I will not attempt to capture all that complexity here, but
I can focus on a couple of the reasons why this subject is so confusing to most
people. Let’s start with the fact that there is no single metric on divorce. There
are many. One of the simplest is the number of people who divorce, per year,
per 1000 people in the U.S. (the so-called “crude” divorce rate). By this
measure, the divorce rate peaked at 5.3 divorces per 1000 people in 1981 (CDC) and has
come down steadily since to 3.6 in 2011 (CDC). A
variation on this type of metric is the number of people who divorce per year,
per 1000 married women—such as used in this National Marriage Project report.

Another simple metric is the percent of people, at any given
time, who have already been divorced. For example, based on their 2007-08 national
survey, the Barna Group found that 33 percent of ever-married adults, and 25 percent of
adults overall, have experienced divorce. Even these seemingly straightforward
numbers can be difficult to interpret because of societal changes in the number
and nature of people who marry today compared to the past.

Predicting the
Lifetime Divorce Risk

All three of these metrics are different from the likelihood
of divorce for a couple marrying for the first time, which is what the oft-repeated
“50 percent chance of divorce” is about. Coming up with a number for lifetime
divorce risk is crazy complicated because it’s a projection about what will
happen in the future based on what has happened in the past. As I understand it,
those demographers who have constructed such projections do so based on careful
analyses of the likelihood of divorcing in various years of marriage based on the
history of divorce within existing samples.

It’s hard to know the original source of the 50-percent
statistic, but it seems to originate from projections of this sort made by
scholars in the early 1980s, around the time when the crude divorce rate was
peaking. For example, in 1984, Paul Glick published a study
saying, among other things, “About one-half of the first marriages of young
adults today are likely to end in divorce.” Subsequent projections, like this 1992 projection by the Census Bureau, came up with similar estimates—but
each projection only applies to couples marrying at the time the projection is
made.

Such era-bound estimates are as good as researchers can do,
because no one can know the precise number for the lifetime risk of divorce for
those marrying right now. Here’s one illustration showing why that’s the case. Suppose
we undertook a study following a representative sample of 20,000 people from
birth to death, while gathering complete marital histories along the way. We
will not know exactly how likely our subjects are to divorce until all of them
are dead (or, technically, until all are dead, divorced, or widowed—that would
work, too). When we get there, the number
for the lifetime divorce risk will be rock solid.

What’s wrong with this mythical study? A lot. First, it
would be extraordinarily expensive and difficult to follow such a sample without
losing track of people. Two, the original researchers will be dead by the time
the answer comes in. (This dampens enthusiasm to start the study.) Three, once
you get this robust answer about the likelihood of divorcing, it’s old news. The
answer will apply to a generation that has almost entirely died out, not to those
who are young when the study ends. People want to know the future, not the
past.

Even if projections about divorce are always tentative and
subject to change, many will want to know: If the 50-percent statistic dates to
the 1980s and there is some evidence that divorce rates have declined for those
starting out now, what’s the right number for today?

I periodically ask sociologist Paul Amato what he believes a
solid prediction would be for couples getting married now for the first time,
and I did so again last week. He noted that it is, indeed, “difficult to know
what’s going on with the divorce rate.” But taking everything he knows into
account—including the most recent elements of the debate noted here—he believes
that the lifetime risk of divorce today is 42 to 45 percent. “And if you throw
in permanent separations that don’t end in divorce,” he added, “then the
overall likelihood of marital disruption is pushing 50 percent.”

Amato relies a good deal on the calculations of Schoen and and Canudas-Romo (2006), and their conclusion that "it is premature to
believe that the probability of divorce has begun to decline" (p. 756). But
he hastened to add that it is very difficult to predict the future divorce
rate. Nevertheless, he noted that young married adults are not divorcing at the
same rate as their parents did at similar ages, so it is likely that the
divorce rate will decline in the future, once the baby boomers (who were and
continue to be highly divorce prone) leave the population. Thus, as others have
suggested, the future may well be brighter than the 42 to 45% risk estimate
suggests, but we do not yet know this will be the case. And there are factors
that work in both directions; for example, as Wolfers noted, health gains mean people are living longer which also means added
years for the possibility of divorce.

Whatever the future holds for the risk of divorce, divorce
isn’t the only family stability metric that matters today (a fact that Raley
and Bumpass, and others, have emphasized). While the divorce rate for young
couples starting out in marriage may be coming down, I believe that the
percentage of children impacted by family instability keeps going up due to the
combination of divorce and never-married parents breaking up (as the majority
of them do by the time their child turns five). This is why I have written that we may be
approaching a perfect storm
with regard to children and attachment insecurity, and that the timing of marriage relative to childbearing remains a big deal. As
sociologist Andrew Cherlin has argued, American families have become marked by turbulence and
churning, and this is not without consequence.

Naturally, young people worry less about societal trends
than about their own likelihood of divorcing, a worry that leads some to avoid
marriage altogether. Of course, that clearly does not mean avoiding the pain of
breaking up. Many others who are already married wonder if they will make it. There
is, however, some good news in all this. For example, there are things people
can do to lower their own risks of divorce and to increase their chances of
having a lasting, loving marriage. And there are many people who are at a substantially lower risk of divorce than they think—a key point argued by people such as Feldhahn. Projections do
not have to be destiny. I’ll take up that subject soon.

This post first appeared on the blog for the Institute for Family Studies on 1-22-2015 with a small addition on 1-23. I would like to thank Anna Sutherland at IFS for her help in editing this piece.

About Me

I am a research professor who conducts studies on marriage and romantic relationships. Along with my colleagues, I also develop materials to help people in their relationships based on research.
In addition to academic publications, I have written or co-written a number of books (see below). Together with colleagues Howard Markman and Natalie Jenkins, I head up a team at PREP, Inc. that produces various materials for use in marriage and relationship education. Howard Markman, Galena Rhoades, and I head up our research team at the University of Denver.

Why Sliding vs. Deciding?

Sliding vs. Deciding is a theme that comes out of my study of commitment and my work with my major colleague in this work, Galena Rhoades. I believe “sliding vs. deciding” captures something important about how romantic relationships develop. The core idea is that people often slide through important transitions in relationships rather than deciding what they are doing and what it means. For example, sociologists Wendy Manning and Pamela Smock conducted a qualitative study of cohabiting couples and found that over one half of couples who are living together didn’t talk about it but simply slid into doing so, paralleling prescient observations from Jo Lindsey in 2000. In our large quantitative study of cohabitation, we have found that most cohabiters report a process more like sliding into cohabitation than talking about it and making a decision about it.

In contrast to sliding, commitments that we are most likely to follow through on are based in decisions. In fact, commitment is making a choice to give up other choices. A commitment is a decision. Do we always need to be making a decision about things? I hope not. But when something important in life is at stake, I believe that deciding will trump sliding in how things turn out.

One of the most important implications of the concept of sliding vs. deciding is when this theme is married to our work and thought on the depths of ambiguity in relationship formation these days and our ideas about inertia. What people are often now seeing is that they are sliding through relationship transitions that cause them to increase constraints and lose options before (or without) noticing that they have just entered a more constrained pathway. As a result, we believe that many people are too often giving up options before they have made a choice. That is far from making a choice to give up other choices. That's losing options because one is not noticing an important, or even potentially high cost slide, is not what solid commitment formation is about.

Three of the most important theory papers written by me and Galena Rhoades are accessible above at the links: "Sliding vs. Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect", "Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment," and the link labeled "SvD Transition and Risk Model."